An Animation Player Decoupled From The Main Timeline
Picture this: Work as usual but somewhere on your second monitor is your animation playing, showing all changes you're making in real time. Immediate feedback makes work more responsive and so it is generally nicer.
Blender already allows you to edit things in motion. Blender however does not allow you to have playback in only one Editor.
There is a function to animate only active editor but it serves optimization and does not allow you to stick to a specific frame. The timeline is still moving.
It's just a QOL feature and might not be worth the effort but it does seem like the groundwork for this is already in Blender and that it could be a good step towards making animation more friendly
6 Comments
By "Immediate feedback", do you mean if a user is actively moving a bone/object without confirming it's placement, that unconfirmed change on that specific frame will be reflected on the separate playback?
Or do you simply mean for "Immediate feedback" to display the changes as soon as they are confirmed?
Either way, I like the concept.
Implied the second one.
The first one does seem better but I have doubts in terms of how realistic that is, considering that real-time motion paths are not a thing yet.
But I'm not in the trenches, not going to pretend like I know with certainty. Whatever makes programmers lives better.
Thaaank youu
This is a big change, but not technically impossible. I am just wondering what your use case is for it. Are you working in motion graphics or character animation or some other field?
It's character animation. The primary use case that I envision is not in the <<large-scale/entire animation>> scope, it's in the <<work on smaller sections when precision is required>>. Small movements within acting, fast-paced combat. To put it in other way, the kind of animation where almost every frame has a key on it. Those tend to be very iterative.
I do see it being even more useful to motion graphics animators (with the clarity of motion often being a bigger priority for them that is) but I can't speak on their behalf with certainty
makes sense, so you'd have a section of the animation on loop while you tweak a single pose. This could actually be a very useful workflow.
Sir yes sir